Friday, December 25, 2015

The purpose of this blog is to turn Friday night dinner into Shabbat.... Please print and share.

Two days ago, on Wednesday morning, Rabbi Reuven Biermacher went to Jerusalem's Old City.

At 10 am the 45-year-old immigrant from Argentina taught a group of Panamanian 16-year-olds something from the Talmud.

They were on summer vacation and their counselor came by to ask the rabbi to give them a break.

The students demurred, “No! We don’t want a break. This is the best class of the day!”

At 11 am he gave his regular Talmud class, followed by a short talk to a group of South American students.

What all three classes had in common was a beloved, wise rabbi, "full of joy and life", who cared for each of his students.

At 12:45 he left the yeshiva and headed towards Jaffa Gate, which is the
main route taken by Jewish residents and tourists, and anyone else who
wants to use it. The footpath outside Jaffa Gate looks like any sidewalk
in any large city.

It was an unseasonably warm, sunny December day in Jerusalem.

And there, returning home to his wife and seven children, Rabbi Biermacher encountered evil.

Two young men lunged at him with knives.

Ofer
Ben-Ari, 46, happened to be driving by and witnessed the attack. With
only his bare hands as weapons, he ran out of his car to save the
rabbi's life.

Police arrived moments later and Ben-Ari was hit by a stray bullet.

Both victims were rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center where they died within an hour of each other.

Biermacher's 16-year-old daughter described him as "a man of gold who
never harmed anyone." One of his colleagues said in a eulogy, "He was
walking example of what we all aspire to be....He was always there for
everyone.... We have to take responsibility to live up to his example
and make a serious change in our lives..... To look at what happened as a
message to me, to think that I deserved this more than he did, and I am
lucky to be here. God has chosen the best among us deliberately....
Instead of thinking, 'Am I safe or am I not safe?' we should think,
"What matters is that I'm doing my job."

Ben-Ari owned a recording studio in Jerusalem and
opened it free of charge to distressed youth. He also provided temporary
housing for the homeless in a property he owned. He is survived by his wife and two children and here is a brief report of his funeral.

These two tragedies leave one speechless.

But I am not sharing them with you to make you sad, rather to foster a
discussion at your dinner table. Perhaps these two questions are
appropriate:

We know that everyone has to die. But is it better to die quickly
and suddenly as they did (in this case as heroes), but without a chance
for anyone to say goodbye? Or to suffer a period of illness first?

We all know (but don't like to think about it too much) that anyone and everyone's fortune could change in a moment. So what?

Shabbat Shalom.

PS - Funds are being established to help the two widows and nine orphans. For more info, post a comment or send an email.

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Friday, December 18, 2015

The goal of this blog is to transform your Friday night dinner table.... Please print and share.

Recognize this critter? It’s a famous lizard called a chameleon.

They’re famous for changing their colors. They really can do that. It’s
quite amazing. They can change from brown to green or other colors in twenty seconds.

But why do they change their colors? Are they trying to hide?

It turns out that they change color to communicate! They use color to
tell other chameleons how they’re feeling! Some colors mean, “Hello, how
are you?” and other colors mean “Stay away from me, I’m not in the mood
to talk right now!”

(We don’t know their language very well, but some people think they may
have a special color for, “How was Trump last night?” What do you
think?)

There are two other cool things about chameleons.

One you can see in these pictures — look at the cool bulging eyes. Each
eye moves independently of the other. Think about it. When you move your
eyes, they move together. Try to imagine being able to look at two
different things at the same time. Is that cool or what?

But they can also work together to see in stereo if needed, like when they want to focus on a juicy bug for breakfast.

This leads me to the other cool thing about the chameleon: its secret
weapon. Even though the chameleon moves incredibly slowly, like a snail,
and looks very vulnerable, it has a truly incredible tongue. Most chameleons have a tongue longer than their own body
that they can shoot out at lightning speed and grab something as heavy
as half their body weight. You ever try catching a fly? Bet you can’t!

But a chameleon can! Its tongue can move faster than muscle tissue can physically move.

I’ll repeat that: it’s tongue, which is made of muscle, can move faster than muscle tissue can move.

How is that possible? It wasn’t until 2004 that scientists figured out
how they do it. The secret is a material called collagen that the
chameleon winds up under its tongue like a spring, turning its tongue
into a 14 miles-per-hour catapult — Wham! Mantis for breakfast!

It is the only creature in the universe known to be able to do that.

There is an interesting midrash that mentions the chameleon:

Noah’s son
Sheim was telling Eliezer about life on the Ark: “We had to feed all the
animals, but my father didn't know what to feed the chameleon. One day
he was sitting and cutting up a pomegranate, when a worm dropped out of
it, which it [the chameleon] consumed. From then on, he mashed up bran
for it, and when it became wormy, it devoured it” (Talmud Sanh. 108b).

(The above is excerpted from our new curriculum to engage students in the wonders nature. For more info, send an email or visit amazingnature4teachers.com. There are two versions - one like the above for Judaics classrooms and one for secular studies classrooms.)

Question for your table: Is the chameleon being more or less "honest" when it changes colors? Do people ever do that?

Shabbat Shalom.

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The Talmud's famous chapter, "Mai Channuka? - What is Channuka?" is most famous for what it leaves out.

Here is the passage in full:

What is Channuka? When the Greeks entered the Holy Sanctuary they
defiled all the oil that was there. And when the dynasty of the
Hasmoneans grew strong and defeated the Greeks, they searched and found
only one flask of oil with the stamp of the Kohen Gadol (High Priest)
that had been set aside; and there was only enough oil to burn for one
day. A miracle occurred and they lit [the Menorah] from this oil for
eight days. The following year the Sages established these days for
praise and thanksgiving. (Shabbat 21b)

It only tells about the miracle of the oil. There is no mention of Hellenism, religious persecution, civil war.

This omission has led to many opinions out there about the history and meaning of Channuka.

Somebody wrote in the Wikipedia article,
"According to the Talmud, unadulterated and undefiled pure olive oil
with the seal of the Kohen Gadol (high priest) was needed for the
menorah in the Temple, which was required to burn throughout the night
every night". As you can see above, the Talmud doesn't actually say
that.

According to myjewishlearning.com, "This event was observed in an eight-day celebration, which was patterned on Sukkot, the autumn festival of huts."

I would like to address the latter view, because it is so widely believed and taken by many to be fact.

It comes from a question historians have. The non-Rabbinic sources we
have that mention Channuka seem to tell a different story than the
Talmud.

For instance, Josephus mentions the fact that we celebrate for eight
days, and that we call it the Festival of Lights, but he claims not to
know why it is called that.

The apocryphal books of Maccabbees make no mention of the miracle of the oil.

Due to these omissions, and due to some other evidence, some historians
have speculated that Channuka started as a belated Sukkot and the rabbis
later invented the story of the miracle. One problem with this theory
is that Josephus doesn't mention it. So it is no stronger an argument
than his omission of the story of the oil.

Let's look at the 3 other pre-Talmudic sources that mention Channuka:

1 Maccabbees
is written by an eyewitness, the best record we have of what happened.
He mentions “blameless priests, such as had delight in the Law”,
implying that there were guilty priests around who did not relish
the Law. Yet he does not mention the idol allegedly set up in the
Temple. He says, “They celebrated the dedication of the altar eight
days, and they offered sacrifices with joy, and sacrifices of salvation,
and of praise.” Notice no mention of the menorah nor why eight days.
Yet we do see the juxtaposition of “celebrated” “dedication and “eight
days”.

2 Maccabbees
is an abridged version of the above by Jason of Sirene, ca. 100 BCE
(not an eyewitness), who wrote in Greek. He also mentions the altar, but
not the menorah. “And they kept eight days with joy, like the feast of
the tabernacles, remembering that not long before they had kept the
feast of the tabernacles when they were in the mountains, and in dens
like wild beasts.” This is the source for some historians to read this
as causative – Eight days of Hannuka because of Sukkot – but the text doesn’t actually say this!

Mishna
- written by Rabbi Yehudah haNasi and colleagues ca. 200 CE. The common
scholarly view is that Channuka is absent from Mishna (as a separate
holiday like Purim which has its own tractate) because Rabbi Yehudah was
anti–Hasmonean. This may explain also why Talmud focuses on miracle and
not on the war. Except that it's not entirely absent from the Mishna,
so this isn't a very strong argument.

This disparate sources yield no easy answer, and we should see that it’s
impossible to say anything for sure – much of what is written in
scholarship is over-confident, not solidly supported by evidence.

My Channuka

Based on all of these sources, I have a slightly different approach.

One has to understand that the Maccabeean war is halachically problematic. It was largely a civil war, Jew against Jew. Who authorized the Maccabees to wage it?

The Maccabees were, in the eyes of their Jewish enemies and the Assyrian
overlords, a band of terrorists. I'm not so sure that the rabbis of the
time (Pharisees) would not have felt the same, even though they surely
sympathized with the cause (the religious persecution was quite brutal -
Judaism was outlawed and religious Jews were heavily persecuted).

So there would have been good reason for the Pharisees and later the
Mishna and Talmud to minimize it. It may be compared to Israel’s war of
independence in 1948 – this is a very uncomfortable halachic position
for right-wing rabbis. Do you celebrate Israel Independence Day? If you celebrate do you say Hallel? If you say Hallel do you say it with a bracha?

Yet they had to deal with the fact that there was this miracle of the oil.

What does the oil prove? That the victory in war was Heaven-sent! But if
you believe that the war was forbidden to wage in the first place, how
do you process that?

Answer: You certainly don’t publicize it.

Then why did they institute a festival at all?

It seems to me that the Hasmoneans
did it first. They made themselves kings and created Channuka to
celebrate and give Divine approbation to their victory. Maybe the rabbis
at the time were passive — they didn’t want to openly support it but
neither could they deny the Jews our victory.

And the holiday stuck.

Centuries later, in writing the Talmud, the rabbis have a holiday that
cannot be ignored (because they believe in the miracle), so they confine
the discussion to the oil and ignore the halachically-problematic war.

This hypothesis explains Josephus, the Mishna and the Talmud, and can
perhaps also explain why the author of 1 Maccabees does not mention the
Menorah nor give a reason for the eight days. Perhaps he himself was a
Pharisee and is ignoring the miracle for a similar reason that the
Talmud ignores the political events and the Mishna ignores both. He
lived at the time of the political events and could not ignore them, but
he could ignore the religious implications. The authors of the
Mishna and Talmud were the opposite - they lived centuries later and
could ignore the uncomfortable political events and focus on only on the
religious part.

So what's today's take-away from all of this?

I think that we should follow the Talmud and focus on the Menorah, but it is important understand the nature of that event.

It is not true that they needed to wait for eight days. That's fiction.

It is not true that they needed special oil. That's fiction.

What is true is that they wanted to use special oil. Why? Because
they were rededicating the Temple for crying out loud, after it had
been turned into a pagan shrine! They wanted the rededication to be as
beautiful as possible.

That, in my mind, is the main theme of Channuka. We should not be
satisified merely to do the right thing in life. We should strive to do
the right thing in the most beautiful way possible.

There's a term for that - hiddur mitzvah - the beautification of a mitzvah.

Some religions completely deny the external and put 100% premium on the internal.

Channuka is about combining the two. The internal matters most, but use the external to beautify it.

For example, let's say you decide to give a beggar a dollar. That's
good, but better to give him a crisp clean dollar than an old worn out
bill. And better to give with a smile than a frown. Same amount of
money!

Judaism is about both faith and action. But not any ol' action. It should be beautiful.